Depending on how good is the source, its usefulness and dependencies, packaging it to Debian is pretty straight forward. The dh_* helpers[2] does the job automatically most of the time. There is also tools for helping with specific languages, like dh-make-golang, dh-python, etc...
[1] https://packages.debian.org/buster/alien
[2] https://manpages.debian.org/testing/debhelper/debhelper.7.en...
It’s not only the differences in the packaging format that you have to take care of. There’s also version differences, path differences, dependency handling, and many other stuff to take care of. These are the kind of tasks which can’t be automated away and require non-trivial amount of work.
For organizations that maintain tens, hundreds, or thousands of CentOS packages that spans multiple teams, moving to other distros would be time-consuming and costly. It would certainly pay off if it was driven by technical reasons, but for organizations that are forced to switch by this announcement, this is just pure overhead.
That's his stack...
>So unless there’s some magic piece of technology that can take CentOS RPMs and make it work flawlessly on any Linux distro,
It's not magic, just alien.
> That's his stack...
What’s your point and when did I ever mention Java?
> It's not magic, just alien.
Dumping the contents of an RPM archive on random distros is never going to work except for the most simple of cases.
That says allot about you packing hygiene, and you don't dump it..that you can do with tar alone. You convert it to a deb.
I suggest you read the source code too, because otherwise you can cause real damage if you use it without understanding how it works.
Though my experience with package manager is that dependency management is hell (rife with potential conflicts), so I do see the problem a bit better.
Still, it shouldn't take that long to fix? Like a few days of sprint to setup Nix or something like that?
As for pinning packages, that’s only practical if you’re using Nix. As much as I prefer Nix over RPMs, not all of us have the pleasure of using Nix at work. It’s kind of a bummer because Nix packages are so much easier to work with and maintain compared to the competition.
If you run a for-profit operation, and downtime is costly, you (or your VP of eng) want a way to pay for immediate assistance from the OS's maker / distributor, when (not if) things go wrong.
There is a difference between asking "how do I ensure there is one throat to choke when things go wrong?", and "how do I minimize the potential for things to go wrong?"
RHEL is a decent solution if you are trying to answer the former question (or both), but many budget conscious orgs focused on the latter and chose CentOS. Red Hat has now pulled the rug out from under them by trimming eight years off the EOL previously committed to with little notice.
EOL in this case means "no security updates" so even if your org was prepared, technically, to deal with a zero-day for example by rolling out an update in a timely manner without relying on paying a vendor for hand-holding, that option has now been eliminated.
Essentially, you now only get the stability and problem-minimization if you also pay the vendor for support. Otherwise you're stuck with a (relatively) unstable rolling release that will keep your internal teams very busy with a constant stream of minor issues, or potentially trying to roll-your-own updates or backports after the EOL for anything serious.
It's difficult to see this as anything other than a naked, money-grabbing betrayal of users.
I have a hard time imagining, and the only scenarios that come to mind are those where things have gone awfully haywire.
I'm sure I'm missing something. Enlighten me?